Waiting on Wednesday: The House Built on Alligator Bones, Your Beloved Remains, Hear the Dead, Rolling Loud, April X, and Stranglehold

                
Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. I changed it and added movies as well as books

The House Built on Alligator Bones

Release date: October 6th

What it's about:

The Greers built their fortune on alligator bones.

Dartrine Beaumont believes her mother’s sudden death has left her alone in the world—until she learns of long-lost wealthy relatives living in Florida. Confused but delighted by the possibility of extended family, Dart travels to her grandmother’s stately Gilded Age mansion on Amelia Island for answers, just in time to stake a claim on an unusual inheritance: an alligator farming empire.

Her arrival at Greer House isn’t everything she hoped. Without warning, Dart finds herself in fierce competition with her grandmother’s arrogant heir-apparent, and tensions rise as threatening acts of vandalism escalate on one of the farms. More unsettling is her hostile grandmother’s fanatical belief that the danger stems from a curse; according to legend, a larger-than-life alligator hunted down by a bloodthirsty ancestor still haunts the family. Yet Dart can’t deny that the farm’s placid alligators hiss only at Greers, or that a shadowy figure creeps through the mansion’s halls, plaguing her with suspicions that the mythical alligator and monstrous, long-dead matriarch may have unfinished business.

As Dart uncovers the truth about her violent birthright, she faces a terrible accept her place in her family’s grim legacy or forge a new path by slaying a different beast entirely.

Your Beloved Remains

Release date: October 6th

What it's about:

As fascination turns to obsession, two women drag each other into an academic horror of forgery, murder, and rage, destined to be devoured by readers of Plain Bad Heroines and If We Were Villains.

Archivist Celia Kiel has spent her life on the remote campus of Basin College in the Southern Ozarks. Once a jewel of women’s higher education in the South, the school now molders on its mountaintop, its endowment thinly supported by the bequeathed estate of 19th century writer, Beatrice Donahue. Celia guards the legacy of this venerated, yet scandalous author, who has been the object of her illicit desire since childhood.

When the administration announces the college's imminent closure, Celia discovers a manuscript pickled in formaldehyde, and with it, a chance to save the only home she's ever known. She will forge Beatrice's infamous lost work, a spellbinding horror written toward her life's tumultuous end. To do it, she is forced to recruit her professional rival, literature postdoc Joan Harriot, who has both an astounding talent for mimicry and a dark secret of her own. As their world closes in and the ghosts of the Victorian past encroach, their creative collaboration spirals into an obsession more twisted than even their beloved Beatrice could have penned.

Hear the Dead

Release date: October 6th

What it's about:

One woman. A string of unsolved murders. Only she can hear the victims.

Elena Altieri never wanted to be famous, and certainly not at sixty-six years old. For over forty years she's been hiding from her New York City punk rock youth in the hills of Vermont, but now, the past is catching up with her in more ways than one. Not only is she losing her hearing, but the photographs she took of a recently deceased musician are going viral. Suddenly, she finds herself summoned back to the city for an exhibit celebrating her work and thrust into a world she'd hoped to keep locked away forever. A world where her best friend, Sin, is dead.

At the exhibit, Elena hears the screams of a woman ringing among the hum of her tinnitus, and she's sure something horrible has occurred. But since no one else can hear them, she convinces herself it's just her damaged ears playing tricks. She tries to put the event behind her, but when the auditory visions continue whenever she touches something of Sin's, she becomes convinced she's hearing her friend's murder. Desperate for answers, she has no choice but dig into the past, and what she'll uncover will not only force her to reckon with her own fractured memories, but might prove that Sin, and other innocent women from their youth, were the victims of an unspeakable crime that only she can solve. Old punks never die, and Elena's going to prove that.

Edgy, mysterious, and full of heart, Hear the Dead is at once an inventive and biting story following one aging woman desperate to solve crimes from her past, and a thought-provoking meditation on friendship, justice, and what it means to remember who we are.

Rolling Loud

Release date: October 2nd

Where to watch: Theaters

What it's about:

A father makes a bad parenting choice by taking his young son to a wild hip-hop festival, leading to chaos as they navigate crowds, security, and family dynamics with eccentric companions.

April X

Release date: October 2nd

Where to watch: Theaters

What it's about:

A high octane, near future thriller about twins Bax and April. When April goes missing, Bax searches every dark corner of the post Soviet cityscape trying to find her, ultimately descending into madness.

Stranglehold

Release date: October 2nd

Where to watch: Rent or buy

What it's about:

Fed up with their lives, barely eking by in small-town Arkansas, a stripper with dreams and her Army vet husband decide to rob the strip club that employs her.